Rarefied Air
The new Macbook takes the laptop to a new level thanks to the firepower of Apple’s new M2 chip
Cutting-edge consumer tech is usually all about compromises.
If you want a laptop that’s fast, it has to be noisy because the chip gets too hot and needs cooling down with fans.
If you want a laptop that has a long battery life it has to be underpowered, or very heavy… quite possibly both.
But what if you could buy a laptop that didn’t bend to the rule of compromises? What if you could have it all?
After testing Apple’s new MacBook Air for a couple of weeks, I’m convinced we’ve hit a watershed moment when there’s no longer any need to settle for anything but everything. The device is a marvel.
Let’s start with the trivialities – the Air has a new design and it’s lost its trademark wedge shape. It now looks like a very thin MacBook Pro.
It’s a very Apple thing to do, take its best selling laptop – the best-selling laptop from anyone, as it happens – and replace it with something new, something totally redesigned.
I can’t believe for a second, though, that this is any kind of gamble – these will sell like the hottest of cakes.
At the heart of it all, and where the magic comes from, is the allnew Apple M2 chip that powers the Air.
It’s Apple’s second in-house custom chip, and improves speed and power consumption over the company’s first effort, the M1.
That makes the whole thing possible – the fast performance, the silent running (there is no fan), and the all-day battery life.
Apple says you can watch video on this thing for 18 hours on a single charge, or browse the web for 15. I have no reason to doubt this – battery worries simply didn’t exist during my testing, during which I edited video and images, played some fairly power-hungry games, and did general stuff like email and web-browsing.
It’s not just the chip that’s better on the new Air, though. Almost every aspect of the machine has received an upgrade over the last M1-powered Air.
The screen is brighter – a 13.6in display with P3 wide colour and support for 1bn colours.
The speakers, too, have received an upgrade – there are four which provide support for Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio.
And the keyboard (including a TouchID fingerprint scanner) and trackpad are easily on par with those found in the higher-end MacBook Pros – they feel identical in use.
Apple has also added some new colour options to the Air range – not quite as colourful as those available for the iMac, but still welcome.
There’s the usual Silver and Space Gray, but also a very subtle gold finish called Starlight, and a deep black Midnight finish.
The other upgrade comes in the charging port – it’s now a MagSafe connection – in other words, the charging cable is secured to the machine magnetically. This means that if anyone trips over the wire it just detaches without dragging your not-inexpensive computer crashing to the floor.
As well as offering that safety feature, the addition of MagSafe also frees up one of the two Thunderbolt/USB-C ports from charging.
The new look, and even the upgrades across the board, kind of fade away from your consciousness when using the device, though. It’s really the speed of the M2 chip that steals the show.
Upgrades in speed are one of those things you don’t really know you need until you have it. When apps open instantly, as they do on this Air (like they do on the iPhone and iPad), and you spend less time waiting for things to happen at every step, going back to a slower computer feels practically medieval.
So there we have it – an absolutely astonishing computer in itself, and surely a game-changer for the industry as a whole.
No compromise, at last.
It’s not just the chip that’s better on their new Air, though. Almost every aspect of the machine has received an upgrade over the last M1-powered Air
The new MacBook Air starts at £1,249 and is available now from apple.com/uk